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Manulife Vitality – Everything you need to know

glennOct 20, 2016

Heard about Manulife’s Vitality program and seeking the fine details? Everything you need to know is here.

What is Vitality?

Manulife Vitality is an option that you can add to a new Term 20 or Term 65 life insurance policy. This option offers you two additional benefits; a potential discount in premiums and a rewards program. The option costs $2/month. It is currently available on coverage amounts of $500,000 to $1,000,000.

What Vitality isn’t.

Vitality does not impact the underlying life insurance or the conditions for coverage. If you purchase $500000 of life insurance from Manulife and add the Vitality option and then subsquently pass away then the $500000 of benefit is paid the same whether or not you had the Vitality option. In other words, there’s no detriment to your life insurance coverage in purchasing this option.

Manulife Vitality premiums

Subscribers to the Vitality program have the option of recieving discounted life insurance premiums. Very roughly if you would expect to receive standard or regular premiums on your life insurance, you can potentially reduce your premiums to a preferred status – this decrease is within your control.

How Vitality premiums work

Manulife has a series of multipliers (denoted by various precious metals, Gold, Bronze, etc) for your premium. You earn each multiplier by completing predefined tasks (summary of tasks is below). So lets say the multiplyer for Silver is 0.95. Each task has predefined points, you qualify for each multiplier by completing tasks. For example, Silver requires 3500. Complete tasks to accumulate 3500 points in one year and your premium will be subject to the silver multiplier – so your premiums X .95 (or, you received about a 5% discount for the year.).

By reaching and maintaining platinum level you receive substantially reduced life insurance premiums and can maintain those lower premiums for the duration of the term. Doing so would put you to the lower limit of the premiums.

So what happens if you later decide to do nothing – you don’t participate in the program? Manulife will over time apply a multiplier that will bring your premiums back in line with where they should be. This would put you at the upper limit of the premiums.

The good news is that if you do nothing at all, the total premiums you would have paid over the term would be the same as if you had not participated in the program. So worst case is the same as do nothing. The upside is that if you do in fact participate, you are in control of reducing your premiums up to Manulife’s lower limit.

You will automatically receive the discounted ‘Gold’ level premiums in your first year since you haven’t had any time to accumulate points. Subsequent years are based on tracking of your points from the prior year.

Summary of Vitality premium structure

In your first year, Manulife will give you the Gold level discounted life insurance premiums. You then complete tasks to accumulate points. Earn enough points and your life insurance premiums will be discounted for the next year. Manulife has a cap on how low your premuims can go as well as a cap on how high they can go. The cap on the higher premiums is equivalent to the premiums you would have paid if you had never participated in the program, over the course of the policy term.

Vitality Rewards Programs

In addition to the potential for cheaper life insurance premiums Manulife is offering rewards programs. Their current line up is sparse but I’ve been assured that they are aggressively seeking to expand their offerings in these programs. It’s expected that current Vitality participants will be able to avail themselves of new rewards programs as they become available.

Vitality Garmin Fitness Tracker

You will receive a Garmin Fitness Tracker as part of joining the Vitality program. This free tracker can be used for your own purposes, but it can also be used to earn the points towards your discounted premiums. Use the tracker to track your fitness related activities, record it at the Vitality site,and potentially earn lower life insurance premiums.

Good Life Fitness membership discount

Vitality members receive a 55% discount on their gym memberships. Given that a retail membership cost is about $600, this benefit alone can substantially offset your life insurance premiums.

Gamification

While I haven’t personally seen this yet, Manulife has some tasks they call ‘gamification’ available on teh website. By performing these game-type activities you can qualify for small amounts of Amazon gift certificates.

….and more to come.

What’s in it for Manulife?

It turns out, that participating in this program isn’t just marketing hype. Manulife has done extensive investigation and has concluded that active monitoring and participation in yuor health regime can have substantial longevity benefits. Simply participating and monitoring means fewer death claims. Even for consumer who may be subject to some medical ratings can transition themselves to a non-rated level of mortality simply by being proactive.

This benefit easy to see. If you know you’re at risk of developing a cancer, aggressively monitoring it’s detection and putting in effort to mitigate that risk can clearly help minimize potential future impact of developing that cancer.
So while this may seem like a marketing twist – and it certainly is a good one – it’s also a way for you to control and be proactive with your longevity in a very concrete fashion.